OLARU CRISTINA MARIA

RUSU MARIA IULIA

ANUL II, ENGLEZA SPANIOLA

Leonard Bloomfield and the American

Structuralism

The term structuralism is used in many contexts in different disciplines in the 20th
century. Structuralism proposes the idea that many phenomena do not occur in isolation, but
instead occur in relation to each other, and that all related phenomena are part of a whole with a
definite, but not necessarily defined, structure. Structuralists, in any area of knowledge, attempt
to perceive that structure and the changes that it may undergo with the goal of furthering the
development of that system of phenomena or ideas. Collective term for a number of linguistic
approaches in the first half of the twentieth century , all based on the work of F. de Saussure, but
strongly divergent from one another. While structuralism in its narrower sense refers to de
Saussures linguistic theories , in its broader sense it is an umbrella term for approaches in
anthropology, ethnology, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism, which in analogy to
linguistic structuralism concentrate on synchronic analysis rather than on genetic / historical
preconditions, in order to expose the universal structures at work under the surface of social
relations.
General term for variously developed branches of structuralism pioneered above all by E.
Sapir (1884 - 1939) and L. Bloomfield (1887 - 1949). Although the various schools cannot be
clearly distinguished from one another, a distinction is made between two general phases: the socalled Bloomfield Era, and distributionalism, with Z. Harris as chief representative.
Leonard Bloomfield (1887 1949) was an American linguist, whose influence dominated
the development of structural linguistics in America between the 1930s and the 1950s. He is

especially known for his book Language (1933), describing the state of the art of linguistics at
its time. Bloomfield was the main founder of the Linguistic Society of America.
Bloomfield's thought was mainly characterized by its behavioristic principles for the
study of meaning, its insistence on formal procedures for the analysis of language data, as well as
a general concern to provide linguistics with rigorous scientific methodology. Its pre-eminence
decreased in the late 1950s and 1960s, after the emergence of Generative Grammar. Bloomfield
also began the genetic examination of the Algonquian language family with his reconstruction of
Proto-Algonquian; his seminal paper on the family remains a cornerstone of Algonquian
historical linguistics today.
Leonard had six main publications during his lifetime, and they too have had their own
little mark in the history of linguists. His first main book came in 1914, when he was an Assistant
Professor at the University of Illinois. It was called Introduction to the study of Language; this
dealt with the overall aspect of language and was just the beginning of Leonard's profound
career. After this Leonard went into the grammatical aspect of the Philippine language, he wrote
and published his next main book Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis (1917). The next
book was called Menomini Texts (1928), one of Bloomfield's least favorable publications. In the
middle of his writing career came Language (1933), which was the book he is renowned for.
From here Leonard went deeper into grammar, and wrote The Stressed Vowels of American
English (1935). The last main book of Leonard Bloomfield's career was when he went back into
the scientific research of language. It dealt with the overall aspect of language and science, and
didn't get as much publicity as Language. This book was called Linguistic Aspects of Science
(1939). At the end of Leonard's writing career, he tried to write about other languages (Dutch and
Russian) but couldn't really get the true feeling out of this, like he did with his other books. In the
end, Leonard Bloomfield is not only considered one of the best Linguists of his time, he is
considered one of the best of all time.
American Structuralism based on structural linguistics developed by Saussure.
Bloomfield is known for applying the principles of behaviorist psychology to linguistics,
defining "the meaning of a linguistic form as the situatio in which the speaker utters it, and the
response it calls forth in the hearer." (Oller, 1979). Sapirs work has always held an attraction for
the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the
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way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of
American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly
influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a drastically
revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the
next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behavioristic approach to the study of
language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual
categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behavioristic theory of semantics
according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response.
Because science was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most
stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for
some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical
analysis of a language on semantic considerations.
Linguistics was in a period of confusion in the early 1930s when Bloomfield battled Sapir
for discipline supremacy. Bloomfield was a colleague of Sapir at Yale University, and they held
opposite theoretical positions, as Bloomfield rejected the possibility that linguistics analyze
meaning, while Sapir thought that semantics is an essential part of the study of language.
Bloomfield had originally been allied with Sapir and a supporter of Saussure's ideas. But
before Yale (at Ohio State), he was influenced by logical positivism and the related movement of
behaviorism. Bloomfield's book Language (1933) dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it
he explicitly adopted a behavioristic approach to the study of language, eschewing, in the name
of scientific objectivity, all reference to mental or conceptual categories.His ideas became strictly
empirical. Such a view discouraged not only an inquiry into the universal properties of language,
but the study of meaning as well, given the notorious difficulty of making explicit the precise
meaning of an utterance.
He adopted the behaviorist theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the
relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Behaviorism was an American school of
psychology founded by John B. Watson, who insisted that all behavior is a physiological
response to environmental stimuli. Behaviorism required Bloomfield to reformulate the place of
semantics within linguistics, since that conception of language does not allow for any kind of
concept or mental image, but only sets of stimuli and responses that occur in certain situations.
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The advantage of speech for the human organism was that one person could receive the
stimulus, but another person carry out the response. Therefore the division of labor and all
advanced civilization results from speech.
Bloomfield's conception of science and of the scientific method shaped his approach to
linguistic matters. He thought that physics and biology obtained scientific control over the
phenomena that they study because they abandoned teleological pseudo-explanations.
Dualistic conceptions of humans assume a mental parallel to the body, a nonphysical
entity such as a mind or a will. The monist conception, compatible with physics and biology, was
taking steps in several disciplines dedicated to the study of language, including psychology.
Bloomfield thought that the Vienna Circle and the behaviorists took an advanced position,
considering false the question of the relation between matter and mind: In scientific
formulations, mentalistic terms should refer to linguistic events, not to a supposed mentalistic
entity.
Mentalistic statements subjected to linguistic analysis will be revealed to be statements
about language. The linguist must observe and register carefully the facts of speech and the
situations in which they happen, without resorting to that which cannot be observed. For
linguistics to be an autonomous scientific discipline, the observations must be free from
prejudices and independent from philosophical, psychological, and commonsense assumptions.
Bloomfield made important empirical contributions to three major subfields of
Linguistics: Indo-European comparative-historical linguistics (including work on Sanskrit as
well as Germanic); the study of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, principally Tagalog; and
descriptive and comparative Algonquian linguistics (a monumental study).
Bloomfield had immense influencethe so-called Bloomfieldian era lasted for more than
20 years. During this time, linguists focused mostly on writing descriptive grammars of
unwritten languages. Bloomfield and his followers were interested in the forms of linguistic
items and in their distributional arrangement. Meaning, according to Bloomfield, was not
observable using rigid methods of analysis, and it was therefore the weak point in language
study.

The 'post-Bloomfieldians' dominated American linguistics in the 1940s and 1950s. One
of their most prominent members was Chomsky's teacher Zellig Harris. For American
structuralists, the ultimate goal of linguistics was the perfection of the discovery proceduresa set
of principles which would give them a foolsproof way to discover the linguistic units of an
unwritten language. Their goal was explicitly to 'discover' a grammar by performing a set of
operations on a corpus of data. Each successive operation was to be one step farther removed
from the corpus.
Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of
linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features of
"post-Bloomfieldian" American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of
semantics. Bloomfield's approach to linguistics was characterized by its emphasis on the
scientific basis of linguistics, adherence to behaviorism especially in his later work, and
emphasis on formal procedures for the analysis of linguistic data. The influence of Bloomfieldian
structural linguistics declined in the late 1950s and 1960s as the theory of Generative Grammar
developed by Noam Chomsky came to predominate.